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This Animal’s Behavior Is Mechanically Programmed
...as a placozoan, has practically an entire branch on the evolutionary tree of life to itself, as well as the smallest known genome in the animal kingdom. But what intrigued...
Mitochondria Double as Tiny Lenses in the Eye
...striking parallel between mammalian eyes and the compound eyes of insects and other arthropods, suggest that our own eyes have hidden levels of optical complexity, and that evolution has found...
How the ‘Diamond of the Plant World’ Helped Land Plants Evolve
...that molecule during their evolution.) Yet the chemistry behind that ability remained blurry. It would have been poetic if Li’s early work on sporopollenin had used pollen collected from the...
Primitive Asgard Cells Show Life on the Brink of Complexity
...is now an evolutionary microbiologist at the University of Amsterdam, set out to find what they hoped would be an evolutionary missing link. Biologists had long used genetic data to...
Missing Mutations Suggest a Reason for Sex
...of those hypothetical individuals supports a theory about the interactions of harmful mutations and the evolutionary value of sex. Alexey Kondrashov, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University...
Life’s First Molecule Was Protein, Not RNA, New Model Suggests
...in actual experimentation. “Everything that goes back further than 2.5 to 3 billion years is speculation,” said Erich Bornberg-Bauer, a professor of molecular evolution at the Westfälische Wilhelms University of...
Is a Bigger Genetic Code Better? Get Ready to Find Out
Evolution settled on a genetic code that uses four letters to name 20 amino acids. Synthetic biologists adding new bases to DNA will be free to improve on nature —...
Gene Drives Work in Mice (if They’re Female)
...an entomologist and evolutionary biologist at North Carolina State University, likens gene drives to the fictional substance ice-nine in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle: a bizarre form of ice that...
Cell-Bacteria Mergers Offer Clues to How Organelles Evolved
...and organelle.” W. Ford Doolittle, an evolutionary and molecular biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, says this study represents “a necessary and exciting amount of ground-truthing” because it tested...